Job Preferences as Revealed by Employee Initiated Job Changes

Christian Grund

No 6127, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Many previous studies try to discover job preferences by directly asking individuals. Since it is not sure, whether answers to these surveys are relevant for actual behaviour, this empirical examination offers a new approach based on representative German data. Employees who quit their job and find a new one, compare the two jobs with respect to eight job characteristics: type of work, pay, chances of promotion, work load, commuting time, work hour regulations, fringe benefits and security against loss of job. It is argued that the observation of many improvements (and few declines) for a certain attribute indicates a particular relevance and high preference for this attribute. It turns out that pay and type of work are most important for employees in this sense. Differences across subgroups of employees with respect to individual characteristics such as sex and age are explored. Those between East- and West-Germany diminish over time.

Keywords: job characteristics; quits; job preferences; job changes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J28 J63 M5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2011-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hrm, nep-lab and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published - published in: International Journal of Human Resource Management 24 (2013), 2825-2850

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